The artist is interested in the intersection of the domestic and the office, a reflection of his personal experience of 24 years in the office environment where he gained first line management skills and was exposed to the ideology of personal and organisational ideologies.
Personal photographs taken by him over those years in the office revealed some interesting changes in the way desks were organised, reflecting the status, role and perception of the individuals within the team.
The office evolved over time from a starting point where individuals had personal desks adorned with mementos of their homes, and partitions and bookshelves to reflect their status as quasi-academics and technicians, to an impersonal hot-desking environment in a state of constant flux as desks were booked for the day only.
At the same time the demands of the IT which the team were focused on became 24x7x52 and eventually resulted in the occasional use of the home to support out of hours implementations followed by a decision to allow office-hours regular working from home once or twice a week.
The psychological state of mind required to spend the day working in one place in one’s home, dealing professionally with one’s customers and colleagues while surrounded by one’s domestic environment and dressed in one’s normal clothes with the normal domestic interruptions are what interested the artist.
The academic background to this investigation is partly the feeling that there is a vacuum of interest from the artistic community, which doesn’t identify readily with the 25% of the population now engaged in office work.
Typology was used in reflection of Bernd and Hilla Bechers’ work documenting the decommissioning of industrial infrastructure. Britain is still in the top 10 manufacturing countries in the world, specialising in skill-based and high tech products such as IT but current trends open the door to a similar de-commissioning of these modern examples of manufacturing.